Busicom
Encyclopedia
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
company that owned the rights to the first microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
, the Intel 4004
Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 was a 4-bit central processing unit released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It was the first complete CPU on one chip, and also the first commercially available microprocessor...
, which they created in partnership with Intel in 1970.
Busicom asked Intel to design a set of integrated circuit
Integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
s for a new line of programmable electronic calculators
Calculator
An electronic calculator is a small, portable, usually inexpensive electronic device used to perform the basic operations of arithmetic. Modern calculators are more portable than most computers, though most PDAs are comparable in size to handheld calculators.The first solid-state electronic...
in 1969. In doing this, they spurred the invention of the first microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
to be commercialized, the Intel 4004
Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 was a 4-bit central processing unit released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It was the first complete CPU on one chip, and also the first commercially available microprocessor...
. Busicom owned the exclusive rights to the design and its components in 1970 but shared them with Intel in 1971.
Two companies have done business as "Busicom" over the years; the Nippon Calculating Machine Corp, Ltd and
Broughtons & Co.(Bristol) Ltd of the UK.
History
The Nippon Calculating Machine Corp was incorporated in 1945 and changed its name in 1967 to Business Computer Corporation, Busicom. Due to a recession in Japan in 1974, Busicom became the first major Japanese company in the calculator industry to fail. Originally, they made Odhner typeOdhner Arithmometer
The Odhner Arithmometer was a very successful pinwheel calculator invented in Russia in 1873 by W. T. Odhner, a Swedish immigrant. Its industrial production officially started in 1890 in Odhner's Saint Petersburg workshop...
mechanical calculators and then moved on to electronic calculators always using state of the art designs. They made the first calculator with a microprocessor for their top of the line machines and they were the first to make calculators with an all-in-one calculator chip, the Mostek MK6010, for their line of inexpensive machines.
One of their last mechanical calculators is the HL-21, an Odhner type machine.
Their first calculator with a microprocessor is the Busicom 141-PF.
Their entry based calculators, the Busicom LE-120A (Handy-LE) and LE-120S (Handy), were the first to fit in a pocket and also the first calculators to use an LED
LEd
LEd is a TeX/LaTeX editing software working under Microsoft Windows. It is a freeware product....
display.
The Microprocessor's History as seen from Busicom's Side
In order to limit production cost, Busicom wanted to design a calculator engine that would be based on a few integrated circuits (ICs), containing some ROMsRead-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
and shift registers
Shift register
In digital circuits, a shift register is a cascade of flip flops, sharing the same clock, which has the output of any one but the last flip-flop connected to the "data" input of the next one in the chain, resulting in a circuit that shifts by one position the one-dimensional "bit array" stored in...
and that could be adapted to a broad range of calculators by just changing the ROM IC chips. Busicom's engineers came up with a design that required 12 ICs and asked Intel, a company founded one year earlier in 1968 for the purpose of making solid state random-access memory
Random-access memory
Random access memory is a form of computer data storage. Today, it takes the form of integrated circuits that allow stored data to be accessed in any order with a worst case performance of constant time. Strictly speaking, modern types of DRAM are therefore not random access, as data is read in...
(RAM), to finalize and manufacture their calculator engine.
Ted Hoff
Marcian Hoff
Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff, Jr. , is one of the inventors of the microprocessor. Hoff joined Intel in 1967 as employee number 12, and is credited with coming up with the idea of using a "universal processor" rather than a variety of custom-designed circuits. His insight started the microprocessor...
was assigned to the project and after studying the design came up with a much more elegant, 4 ICs implementation centered on what was to become the 4004 microprocessor surrounded by a mixture of 3 different ICs containing ROM, shift registers, input/output ports and some RAM—Intel's first product (1969) was the 3101 Schottky
Schottky barrier
A Schottky barrier, named after Walter H. Schottky, is a potential barrier formed at a metal–semiconductor junction which has rectifying characteristics, suitable for use as a diode...
TTL bipolar
Bipolar junction transistor
|- align = "center"| || PNP|- align = "center"| || NPNA bipolar transistor is a three-terminal electronic device constructed of doped semiconductor material and may be used in amplifying or switching applications. Bipolar transistors are so named because their operation involves both electrons...
64-bit SRAM.
Busicom's management agreed to Hoff's new design and the chips were delivered in late 1970.
In mid 1971 Busicom, which had exclusive right to the design and its components, asked Intel to lower their prices. Intel renegotiated their contract and Busicom gave up its exclusive rights to the chips.
A few months later, on November 15, 1971, Intel announced the immediate availability of the first microprocessor chipset
Chipset
A chipset, PC chipset, or chip set refers to a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together. They are usually marketed as a single product.- Computers :...
family, the MCS-4 micro computer set (all from the Busicom design) with an advertisement in Electronic News.